Impersonality in T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

No single person has influenced the development of modern English and American poetry quite as much as Thomas Stearns Eliot, both as a poet and as a critic.
He derived his influences from many great individuals. In 1906 he entered Harvard University, where his early taste for poetry was qualified by the anti-Romantic teachings of Irving Babbitt. After receiving the Harvard M.A. in philosophy, T. S. Eliot went to Paris in 1910 for a year and studied the philosophy of Henri Bergson , whose theory of time and intuition--"distinguishing between clock time and a duration of a different order , and between orders of experience which one analyzes with the intelligence and those which one intuits as 'intensive manifolds' (The Oxford Anthology, vol 2, pp1970)-left its traces on his poetry. He was also studying the 'metaphysical poets', the French Symbolist poets and the Jacobean drama.These influences, along with an essentially pessimistic view of the plight of the modern man, he combined into a poetry and a critical philosophy which has to a large extent shaped the directions of modern poetry in America and in England as well.
Eliot is a peculiar poet in a sense. His production is relatively meager in bulk and the variety of his work is somewhat limited. That is, he was not concerned witha great variety of ideas, but he explored thoroughly those ideas with which he was concerned. Prufrock is the earliest statement of a number of themes that Eliot was to explore again and again in his subsequent poetry. His view of these problems did change over the years but the problems with which he concerned himself did not change.
Eliot began Prufrock at Harvard in 1910 and finished it in Munich in the following year. At this time he was much under the influence of the French poet Jules Laforgue, whose methods of fantastic irony, free association and deliberate bathos here--in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock--are adopted. This poem--first published in 1915--is the song of a being divided between passion and timidity, the song of frustration and emotional conflict. It begins with an extract from Dante's Inferno, in which the speaker, Guido de Montefeltrois placed in the eighth circle of hell for giving evil counsel. He is wrapped in a flame and speaks from its trembling tip. The persona of the poem also tries to speak with a similar frankness, but this persona--Mr Prufrock--is an unromantic Hamlet in a 'tragical-comical-historical' urban drama where 'Denmark's prison' for Prufrock is the prison of a divided self in the tortures of neurotic conflict. His 'love song' , as the epigraph implies, will never be uttered outside the inferno of his own mind. In brief, we can draw a parallel between the persona of Prufrock and that of Montefeltro and between the persona of Prufrock and that of Hamlet.
The poem is a monologue of J. Alfred Prufrock Spoken by 'I'. The beginning is quite vague, because we do not know to whom Prufrock speaks. It may be a woman to whom he addresses this 'love song', but later it becomes clear that the 'I' and 'you' of the poem are not two persons but rather two aspects of the same person: the public personality and the ego. In addition to contributing to the effect of the monologue, the use of the pronouns creates the impression of a man talking to himself in the mirror. However, the first section of the poem, the first twelve lines--sincethere are not stanzas, there are rather sections consistig of various numbers of lines--introduces as quite a determined person, who knows what he wants without any doubt, who encourages the two of his divided self to go for some adventure in the evening, who knows the streets, cheap hotels and restaurants well as if he was an experienced lady-killer. Even the 'overwhelming questions' do not matter here at the beginning when he says:
Streets that follow like tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, 'What is it ?'
Let us go and make our visit.

So, in the last line he is very resolute. Then two lines come:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

as the first sign of Prufrock's being confused, and what is more, it makes the reader confused, too. The vision of a determined man fades away. One thing is sure, Prufrock got into a highly aristocratic company inside a room.
The next section--lines 15-22--confirms our assumption. It is a foolish personification of the yellow fog that Prufrock is talking about. This yellow fog makes him think that everything has the proper time to happen and it is so unbelievable, as if it were a hallucination of a mentally ill person. I personally think that such a chain of ideas does not come into a healthy man's mind.
What he tells us about time is very similar to a part from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
To everything there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted,
a time to kill, and a time to heal, . . .
a time to weep, and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn, and a time to dance, . . .
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.

He becomes more and more indecisive and embarrassed as if he was preparing for his first date with a girl, but it is plain--from his 'bald spot in the middle of his hair'--that he is not a young man. Actually, this is the right situation of Mr Prufrock, which is clear to the reader from the title, in spite of the fact that it is never uttered in the poem.
This plight of irresolution makes him feel that minutes are so long that he could make decisions and revisions again and again, and this is the misterious truth which was studied by Henri Bergson. In the next section he says he experienced everything that can be experienced. These things destroyed his illusionsand these are the reasons why he do not even dare to say a word to the admired woman. Maybe he considers himself not to be suitable to this apparently distingushed company. He assumes that his thoughts seem ridiculous. Then he says:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

He wishes to get away to the world of instincts, where there are no moral decisions and the tortures which are inseparable from it and which almost kill Prufrock. T. S. Eliot does not express everything plainly. He applies possibly the most complicated, sophisticated metaphors, and besides this he does not expound any thoght thoroughlyin order to force the reader think over after every section what Prufrock is meditating on. And it is quite interesting that we do not even think of what Eliot wants to say to us. For example, the wish to get away to the instinctual life can be the theme for couple of other poems, but Eliot let the readers 'create' their own poems in their own minds.
As we go further we can see that Prufrock is entirely, totally confused. He considers the world to be corrupted and futile, but in this world his original expressions and deeds--coming closer to a woman--would be useless because this surrounding would not appreciate it. While he is aware of beauty, he is too inhibited to seek it, too hesitant to reach for it, and too surrounded by the sordid to achieve it. He puts himself into the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet, because he cannot be a hero like John the Baptist or he cannot preach the meaning of life as Lazarus, the living evidence of redemption, could do, but he is able to imagine himself only as a Fool in an Elizabethan drama, who says some meaningful sentences, and at the same time remains to be an unimportant and ridiculous clown. Then he admits that he is old and there are no new things waiting for him. It is futile for him to eat a peach, because he cannot gain in knowledge any more--it is similar to the Fall of Adam and Eve. Once he was on the verge of reaching the impossible by 'hearing the mermaids singing, each, to each', but he will not reach the total happiness, the mermaids will not sing to him at any time. It would be a pleasant life for Prufrock to dwell among the mermaids , which is his dream, but the world, the people always spoil this pleasure and at the end of the poem 'we'--both self of Prufrock--drown.
As this poem is a dramatic monologue, which clear to everyone for the first reading, it owes an obvious dept to Browning also, but has developed a new obliquity and reticence, there is no attempt to give the persona of Prufrock the interiority or solidity of a Browning persona. This is in part due to Eliot's current study of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, who treated personalit as a delusion, holding that the so-called 'finite centre', which can be defined briefly as the focus of consciousness or the immediate experience, of the perceiving person is unknowable by other such centres. (Kenner pp 36-57)
T. S. Eliot was not an adherent of Romanticism. He considered himself as classical in literature, which meant that he thought good poetry should not be a direct expression of feelings, it should be an escape from emotions and escape from personality. T. S. Eliot developed this new poetic ideal together with his friend Ezra Pound. For Pound the poet is like a sculptorshaping and paring down to a verbal structure in order to make ir perfectly correspond to an emotional state--not necessarily the poet's. This not an expressive activity, but a technical one. As Eliot argued, the mind of the poet is an impersonal medium and not a personality. This is stated in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent: "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He believed it was important to look carefully at the poetry, not at the poet: "We can only saythat the poem, in some sense, has its own life. The feeling or emotion resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion in the mind of the poet."(TatIT) It means that the poem's meaning can be derived only from the poem itself and not from a supposed intention which preceeded it. We can deduce the poet's intention only from the poem itself, which realizes the intention. In other words, once it is written the poem is no longer the author's property. This belief justified the use of an inscrutable persona and that he let the readers think on their own by not writing plainly down everything and, of course, the many allusions for example from Shakespeare, from the Bible or from the study of Bergson.
Eliot's other famous theory , which is expressed briefly in the essay on 'Hamlet', of the objective correlative, implied that the work in its objective existencecalled for a collaborative effort which would be different for different readers so that it would suggest no agreed story or interpretation, its relationship to what went on in the poet's mind is impenetrably obscure and irrelevant.
This poem of dejection is written quite expressly to exemplify this kind of poetry. The pose that Eliot adapts in this poem is interesting. The 'voice' of the poem is the voice of an old man, yet, Eliot was less than thirty years old when he wrote it. The voice of age becomes a device typical of much of Eliot's verse. The basic concern with the destructionof the sensitive individual by the surrounding sordidness and by the perversion of ancient values is a theme that Eliot was to explore again and again. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the best of Eliot's early poetry. He thought so himself, and said so in a letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of the journal Poetry, in which '{Prufrock}' first appeared. This is the best example of what T. S. Eliot wanted to create in his poetry. He thought his task as a poet is not to be the object of a poem, but to be the subject of it, just as he wrote in Tradition and the Individual Talent:
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. ... In fact the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal'. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.